On this day in 2006 Anthony Albanese MP (now leader of the Opposition and perhaps Australia’s next Prime Minister) and Federal Labor MP Bob Sercombe launched Our Drowning Neighbours, Labor’s Policy Discussion Paper on Climate Change in the Pacific.
This was part of the ALP’s use of climate as an ‘wedge’ issue to differentiate itself from the (seemingly-endless) government of John Howard (we will be coming back to him more than once in the course of this project). That use of climate as a wedge would accelerate markedly when, at the end of 2006, Kevin Rudd took over as opposition leader.
Why this matters. By the early 1980s, once the science and consequences of what was then called the “carbon dioxide problem” was basically settled, the sea level rise issue has been understood. And islands and low-lying states knew they had an existential (and not in the wanky Sartre sense) problem. And there have been endless declarations about this. And Australia, as the big beast in the South Pacific, and as the very big polluter (both domestically and via its coal – and more lately gas exports) is always going to be in the frame.
What happened next – The Labor Party formed a government in 2007, in the “first climate change election.” Refugee issues were on the agenda for Rudd and then Gillard, but not in the way that Albanese and Seccombe might have thought.. Australia is now fortress Australia, and you wouldn’t bet on a different set of policies any time soon. Meanwhile, the small island states know that they will simply not be there in another fifty years.
On this day, next year,… no wait, what? Yes 2023. I thought it worth discussing what I used to call the “January 4 2023 problem”, since we’re almost there.
On June 12 of 2019, near the beginning of the latest wave of concern about climate change, I wrote an article which you can read here.
The TL:DR. Sustaining social movement organizations is really difficult, and especially so around climate change. Has Climate Emergency Manchester, the group I was until recently involved in, solved the January 4 2023 problem?
Twitter – @ClimateEmergMcr
It’s too early to say, obviously, but the signs are encouraging. And here’s what Chloe Jeffries had to say
From January 4 2022 through to January 4 2023 CEM has a clear vision of what it is trying to do but will be faced with its toughest challenges yet. You might think that setting up a group would be the most difficult stage. Or that our momentum stalled as the pandemic first hit. But CEM was founded at the start of an upswing in attention to the climate crisis. That cycle is over. We can debate when it next picks up, and from what baseline. But in 2022 we have to sustain a social movement organisation as much public and media interest drifts elsewhere.
This is why the ‘4th January problem’ is important over the next 12 months. It will keep us focused, or help us to reset when tasks slip or a mistake is made. Or, when a piece we put out sinks without trace. We have several things in our favour; a strong core group, bolstered by two new members who worked closely with us for over a year before joining the inner sanctum; a healthy cohort of new volunteers who became involved in the final stretch of the last attention cycle (COP26) and who have already cut their teeth on concrete tasks. We have good relationships with a wider group of supporters and organisations and must use this effectively in the coming year. It will be difficult for them too. CEM also ended 2021 on a high, with a strong piece of research (on Manchester’s airport hypocrisy). December outputs have the potential to tie us through the Christmas and New Year torpor.
Solving the 4th January 2023 problem will remain the goal, but that does not mean that our tactics will stay the same right through, that we march on regardless (if anything we will do even less marching, and we never did much). I’m conscious that some of CEM’s 2019 / 2020 repertoire no longer works as well as it once did, even if innovative when first trialled. To give an example, in our reporting of Manchester City Council’s scrutiny committees, the format of one volunteer assigned to one committee has peaked. Volunteers whose committees never discuss climate get disillusioned sharp; others go native on their patch. Meanwhile, we tie up resources covering 2.5hr meetings with little or no implications for the climate emergency and then cannot cover a damning report put out by the Manchester Climate Change Agency or (likely in 2022) a fuzzy statement by the new council leader. With the 4th January problem in sight, we should be able to spot issues around functioning and effectiveness sooner and adapt (in the example above, this will be through re-assigning volunteers and giving individuals a different brief, to follow an issue rather than a committee). Already a fresh programme of work we have begun on climate change and health inequalities is shaking up the kaleidoscope pieces, bringing some different names (both from the council and civil society) into play.
What happens after 4th January 2023? Even once this date is passed, I can see the value in setting a new date to backcast from and for this to again fall early in the calendar year. Invariably those first few weeks prove tough for sustaining morale, for all the recurring reasons that the original 2019 article points out. Since then, the cost of living crisis has only worsened. The coming years will see rising inflation and energy bills that bite hard in winter and make it hard to start work with folk we don’t already know.
On the surface, it may look like little is happening with policymakers or government at this time of year too, slumping back after the seasonal break. But is that entirely true? I hope the other entries in this series provide some evidence to the contrary. A gap in public meetings might remind us that plenty goes on behind closed doors. Local authorities have budgets to sign off. And you can usually bury bad news under a snowdrift. On my Christmas walks in 2021/2, I have been listening to Obama’s account of his first term in office (all politicians and political memoirs are flawed, but at 29hrs it gives great insight into the workings of government). The response to the financial crisis is a revealing episode (or three). Much was hammered out with the banks in early January 2009, before the inauguration. Not all the negotiations were reported in the press. Yet it struck me that many at the time might have seen what they wanted to see. If you remained wedded to the notion that January is all about easing back in, and looking far out on the horizon at the year ahead, you could have filled your boots on long reads about the new family at the White House, who might sing at the swearing in and What This All Meant for America. But if you maintained what we in CEM call ‘situational awareness’, you might have recognised that crucial decisions about the economy were being made day-by-day. In 2009, we got a competent tinkering of capitalism. In Manchester 2022, we also have a new leader who will make roughly the right public noises (including on climate) but not overhaul the system. Alongside the 4 January 2023 problem of sustenance / abeyance, we have the problem that comes with every new year (heightened in Manchester in 2022) of not letting power off the hook. Don’t start unsustainably, but don’t go gently into the new year.
On this day, 30 years ago, to coincide with the visit of President George HW Bush to Australia, Greenpeace Australia took out newspaper adverts of the Statue of Liberty with smoke billowing from her torch, calling on the United States to drastically reduce its carbon emissions.
The context for this was that negotiations for the climate treaty to be signed in Rio later that year were well underway. And all the signs were that the US would play a spoiling role.
This matters, because that’s exactly what Uncle Sam did. The French said rightly, that targets and timetables for emissions reductions by wealthy countries should be included in the text of the treaty. The Americans replied, “if you put those in, we’re not coming.” The French blinked, reasoning that timetables and targets could be inserted later. They were at Kyoto, vastly inadequate, but there. And then the Americans didn’t ratify and withdrew from the process.
We are still living with the consequences of this. And our children, other people’s children, other people’s children will all also live with those. Not to mention all the other species we “share” this planet with.
It’s always worth remembering that these agreements that we live with now were the result of previous proposals, compromises and in this case -as in many others – naked veto power.
Obviously not much to report yet. Three posts up (two on January 1st – most days will just be one). I’ve set myself some notional targets –
I’d like (at least) 36 guest blog posts during the course of the year, with no more than half of them (fewer if possible!) by white male academics like me, writing about the wider world (what New Internationalist rightly calls ‘the Majority World‘, because that’s where the majority of humans live. We have one for January 31st already, and if you’d like to do a guest post, get in touch, in the first instance via Twitter – @our_yesterdays.
I’d like (at least) 2000 Twitter followers by the end of the year (I started with 48, now up to 50). This is an even-more-than-usual arbitrary number, perhaps over-ambitious.
More generally, the point of the site, for myself, is to get (much) better at the whole digital humanities thing. If you have skills/knowledge you think I should have, please get in touch…
As ever, here’s what this site is for, here’s how you can help/get involved.
What you may have missed in the last week on the site
Er, not much, beyond Weather Modification (Jan 1st) and the like.
What I’ve been reading/watching/listening to
Don’t Look Up – liked it. Submitted a 2.5k piece to a journal. watch this space
Finished “The Big Bang Theory” (yes, all 12 seasons). Liked it a lot.
About a forgotten 1988-9 Environmental group in the UK. Am writing about this- watch this space.
The week of 3-9 January is brought to you by the letter S: Posts about social movement resilience, spoofing the stock market, sulfur taxes and sea-level rise.
What’s coming up in the next week in the real world
Nothing in particular, climate-wise, that I am aware of (over time I hope to build up some horizon scanning capacity..
On this day, eight years ago, Donald Trump tweeted that global warming was a hoax. Specifically –
This very expensive GLOBAL WARMING bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temps, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 2, 2014
This was neither Trump’s first or last tweet on the subject. There’s this corker from a couple of years previously:
We can see this as a morality tale of a wicked man or we can take an historical and sociological view. Historically, we could look at the 1991 campaign especially aimed at older white men. Under the name or Information Council on the Environment (“ICE” – geddit?), as described in Ross Gelbspan’s book “The Heat is On” and elsewhere (see the climatefiles too!)
Sociologically, we could use anti-reflexivity, the concept of McCright and Dunlap developed, to explain not just Trump, but Trump’s enduring popularity with people who pine for an imagined 1950s where straight, white men. were in charge. Women were in the kitchen, people of color were “colored” people who knew the place and Mother Nature was under the thumb.
I don’t need to tell you what happened next – you’re watching it.
On this day, 64 years ago the New York Times had a front page story with the title “US is Urged to Seek Methods to Control the World’s Weather”. New York Times, 1 January, p1
WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 — A special advisory committee recommended to President Eisenhower today an expanded and vigorous Government research program into how to control or modify the world’s weather
This was of course peak-Cold War. A few months previously the Russians, having captured better Nazi rocket scientists than the Americans had managed to paperclip, had aput a small metal ball into orbit, causing panic and despair.
Given the general paranoia and offense to the Uncle Sam’s amour propre, it’s surprising we didn’t end up with a “cloud gap” to match the illusory-but-useful bomber gap and missile gap…
Why this matters: we need to remember that the early history of understanding the climate is wrapped up in military needs (think about the British Navy and the Met Office) and computational models – see Edwards, 2010). It’s all part of the whole “give me absolute control over every living soul” thing that is steadily dooming us.
There is a strand of conspiratorial thinking, and fiction, which has ‘weather wars’ successfully being fought (I have a bunch of these novels, and should write about them. They’re fun, while bonkers).
What happened next? The IGY yielded a great findings (though the Pentagon briefly baulked at continuing to fund the C02 measures on Mauna Loa – that’s for another time). Weather modification experiments continued, but came up against the limits of human power.
On this day, 15 years ago, the now defunct newspaper the Independent, ran a front page interview with famed climate scientist James Hansen.
This came with climate change already high on the agenda – the previous year had seen the first “Camp for Climate Action” and the release of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. New Conservative Party leader David Cameron had decided environmentalism was a leading way to detoxify the Tory brand, and in April 2006 had travelled to the Arctic to ‘hug a huskie’. More generally, humanity was going through its second big “something must be done” moment on climate (and its third on environmental matters more broadly – see “issue attention cycles” in the concepts page of this site).
In the interview Hansen, famous for his efforts to raise public awareness and concern, predating his iconic June 23 1988 testimony in front of a Senate committee (which we will return to later) said
““If we go another 10 years, by 2015, at the current rate of growth of Co2 emissions, which is about 2 per cent per year, the emissions in 2015 will be 35 per cent larger than they were in 2000. But if we want to get on a scenario that keeps global temperature in the range that it’s been in for the last million years we would need to decrease the emissions by something of the order of 25 per cent by the middle of the century and by something like 75 per cent by the end of the century“
Hansen is usually out in front on these matters. Events have overtaken him on this one, and there is now scientific consensus around much much steeper cuts in emissions. There is an alleged political consensus around “zero carbon” by 2050.
So, an ignored warning from the past. So what? This matters because there will still be people who tell you ‘”we’ve only just become aware of the problem, we need to give technology time to work”.
